As the dishes were cleared, Robin kept hearing what Peter had told her: “She wants to talk to you.”
No. Robin was the governor, after all. She didn’t have to talk to anyone she didn’t want to. So she opted for the safe way out and decided she wasn’t going to talk to Adrienne.
Chapter Nine
When we returned to the dorm room that night, there was a sheet of paper taped to our door. It was from Lydia, the RA. She wasn’t pleased that we hadn’t stayed to be “briefed” on whatever it was she was going to brief us on. The sheet had a list of things that weren’t allowed in the dorm—smoking; sex; drinking; drugs; pets, including but not limited to hamsters and fish; leaving hot plates and curling irons plugged in—the usual. Adrienne ripped it off the door as we went inside.
“She’s fucking nuts,” she said.
“Oh, did you meet her?” I asked. “At first I thought she was my roommate.”
“No wonder you were so freaked when I got here.” We shared a smile. Lydia was like no one in my, or apparently Adrienne’s, life experience. “She stopped me in the hall when I first came in. All this shit about hurricane preparedness.” She laughed.
“What exactly is that about?” I asked.
“You don’t need a meeting about how to prepare for a hurricane,” Adrienne explained. “It’s no big deal. You just tape your windows and get a six-pack to wait out the storm.”
Something told me these weren’t official tips.
“Of course,” she continued. “I’m from central Florida, so we really don’t get many of them. She’ll probably tell you all this stuff about getting extra batteries, canned food, a can opener. If something happens, I’ll get the stuff.” She smiled at me like she was my protector.
When I looked around the room, I realized that I didn’t see a bathroom door. “Where’s the bathroom?” I asked suspiciously.
“Out there,” Adrienne replied casually, throwing her keys on the desk.
“Out where?”
“Down the hall.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
She shook her head. “Geez, you really are a little princess.”
I raced down the hall and saw the familiar public restroom symbol, the circular head with a triangle underneath that indicated the dress that all women supposedly wore. Either that, or we were supposed to have bodies shaped like triangles.
I pushed open the offensive door to find four bathroom stalls, four sinks across from them and four shower stalls, two of which had flimsy, mildew-covered curtains hanging on rusty rods. The other two had no curtains at all!
“Oh no,” I breathed, no, panted, my eyes wide with shock. Who would even consider taking a shower without a curtain? Those had to be for the exhibitionist girls who wanted everyone to look at them, like the ones in the high school locker room. I always tried hard not to look at those girls. Sometimes I couldn’t help it. They were so distracting, though. Even if I closed my eyes, I’d open them and find myself face-to-face with a bare torso or belly button or something farther south that would surely lead me to hell. I’d feel so badly for seeing anything, I’d want to rush to church immediately and pray away my guilt.
When I returned to the room, I paced the floor and kept exhaling with my hand covering my mouth. I must’ve looked like Norman Bates in Psycho when he’s just realized he’s murdered a woman in the shower.
“I can’t do this,” I exclaimed. “I can’t handle public restrooms!” I was a step away from breathing into a paper bag, too caught up in my own drama to notice there was another crisis already in progress—Adrienne was kneeling on the floor with a wadded up tissue in her hand.
“You’ll handle it,” she replied. “At least it’s not coed.”
“You don’t understand. I nearly failed gym class because I wouldn’t change into shorts in front of the other girls.”
“Nearly?”
“Yes. The coach let me write a paper detailing the benefits of cardiovascular exercise instead.”
I suddenly noticed that Adrienne was looking for something underneath the desk. I didn’t have to wait long to find out what it was. A giant Florida-sized roach emerged from underneath the desk and scurried across the floor. I screamed and jumped on my bed. “We have roaches!”
“Calm down. It’s just a palmetto bug.”
“I don’t care where it’s from! It’s a bug!”
“Just be glad it’s not the kind that flies.”
“What?” I couldn’t imagine such a thing. I might as well be going to college in South America.
“Oh yeah,” she said, clearly relishing the moment. “Some fly right at your head.”
“You’ve got to be kidding!”
She rolled her eyes and laughed. “You’re hysterical.” With sharp precision, her boot caught the traveling bug. The resulting crunch was more than I could stand.
“I think I’m going to throw up.”
“Nah. You don’t wanna throw up in a public restroom. Someone might hear.”
I glared at her. The bug wasn’t the only vile creature in the room.
“Could you get me another tissue?” Adrienne was impatient.
Slowly, reluctantly, I skirted the crime scene and headed for the door. I returned with fresh tissues in hand, offering them to her from a distance. “I’m sorry,” I said. “But that bug’s so ugly it makes me want to cry.”
Adrienne looked up. “Now, c’mon. How would you like it if someone said that about you?”
I shrugged. “They probably do.”
“I doubt that.” There was a twinkle in her eyes that made heat rush to my face again. I lowered my eyes and everything was quiet.
That night, I lay wide awake in my bed, so distracted by the scary feelings I was having about Adrienne that I even forgot about the palmetto bugs. Was this going to be a year of sleepless nights?
Chapter Ten
I’d never showered in a public place before. In fact, I was one of those girls who couldn’t even pee in a public restroom if another woman was in the stall next door. My first morning before class, I went into the bathroom and waited for one of the showers that had a dingy shower curtain. The water had just stopped running in the one on the end, so whoever was using it would soon be out. Understandably, nobody wanted to use the curtainless ones.
A girl who looked as nervous as I was slid back the curtain and, clutching her towel, rushed by me without making eye contact. Juggling a basket of shampoo, soap and razors, I stepped into the shower carefully, trying to decide where to hang my towel. The tiles were already wet, and I could almost feel the mold and bacteria slithering over my feet and up my legs. I hung the towel gingerly over what I was certain was the contaminated curtain and curtain rod. Then as quickly as I could, I turned on the hot water, which was lukewarm now.
I soaped up as quickly as possible, fearful that someone might walk in on me. Or worse, that Adrienne might come in. Adrienne was probably one of those girls who had no boundaries about nudity. The night before, I’d made sure my back was to her while we dressed for bed. But she seemed like the type to strut around naked just to get a reaction. Or one of those spring break girls who flashes crowds from motel balconies. I bet she did that. I shuddered, angry with myself that the thought made me angry. What was my problem?
To avoid accidentally flashing a stranger myself, I was sure to make lots of throat-clearing noises. That way if anyone who came in and wondered, in spite of the already running water and mushroom cloud of steam billowing from its top, if the shower was occupied, they would know beyond a reasonable doubt that it was. It was the fastest, most stressful, heart-pounding shower ever taken in the history of showers.
I wrapped myself in my fluffy, but slightly damp towel, imagined getting toe fungus and hurried out of the shower room. Struggling to hold up my towel, I flew down the hall, my eyes fixed on the thin industrial carpet beneath my feet. I felt like some kind of streaker. It was like the dream you have that you’re naked in public. Only I was naked
, with only a towel between me and the leering public. When I got back to the room, Adrienne left to take her turn in the shower.
As I hurried to get dressed before she came back and walked in on me, I thought about my father’s description of when he was in the infantry, where there had been rows of commodes with no walls or doors and guys were just passing the toilet paper roll to each other, like passing the salt at a table. Dad liked to talk about things that made my mom uncomfortable, especially after a few drinks, just to see the expression on her face. That had been one of his favorite stories.
While Dad did his best to act like he had been okay with those kinds of facilities, I knew that I definitely was not. This type of living arrangement wasn’t suitable for me. This was the way people lived in Third World countries. Why did they even bother giving us a bathroom at all? I wondered angrily. Why not just have a trough behind the building where everyone could pee? It was all so gross and undignified. I’d come from a house with six bathrooms, not a straw hut in the jungle. If I was a princess, as Adrienne called me, then so be it. I wasn’t supposed to be squatting in public places or committing acts of indecency every time I took a shower. This was all wrong.
Chapter Eleven
That night, Robin knocked on Kendrick’s bedroom door.
“Come in.” Robin could hear the apprehension in her daughter’s voice. She was probably bracing for a conversation about body changes or menstruation.
“Hon,” Robin began. “There’s going to be more talk over the next few days.”
“Please,” Kendrick said. “I don’t care what they say. I know you don’t like puss–” She stopped herself before her mother’s eyes caught fire. “I know it’s not true,” she said softly.
“You shouldn’t be talking like that.”
“It’s how everyone talks at school.”
“I don’t care how they talk at school! You need to show that you have class, that you’re a cut above.”
“Yeah,” Kendrick grumbled. “Might as well just put a big target on my head.”
Robin’s mouth turned down in moderate disapproval, but she nodded, understanding what her daughter meant. “I’m sorry.”
Unbeknownst to Kendrick, that frown was also the expression Robin had given her doctor when she learned she was pregnant. While having a child was part of her plans, the timing was terrible. She had been working on tougher legislation for domestic violence and sexual assaults. A girl she’d known in high school had been attacked walking home from school one day. Hardly anyone wanted to talk much about it. And when her assailant was finally caught, his jail sentence was so light that to Robin it seemed he might as well have gotten a mere slap on the wrist.
Growing up in a male-dominated household, she hadn’t heard much about issues that affected women. It was understood that she couldn’t go downtown at night by herself, while Kenneth could. This had struck her as spectacularly unfair. Instead of joining in her frustration, though, her father and brother seemed to shrug it off. Even her mother seemed to think that it was just the way the world was.
But Robin had a chance to do something about it now. She had worked so hard gaining support for these bills; she wanted to see them through. She didn’t want to appear at state senate meetings with an expanding belly, because she knew that what her male peers said and what they thought were two different things. She could see it in their eyes when they nodded politely at her in the halls of the state capitol. They saw her not as a woman who cared about her career, but as someone only two steps away from being covered in strained peas and baby puke.
“You can say times have changed all you want,” Robin had told Tom. “But you still have to play with the boys if you want a career. You can’t be seen as someone who’s going to quit her job the first time there’s a skinned knee and stay at home to take care of offspring.” And she had really used the word “offspring.” It was the only way she had been able to cope with what was happening to her body and her head.
She managed somehow to not only deliver a healthy seven-pound baby girl but also get her bills passed, even if they had to be slightly diluted to please everyone. To demonstrate her down-home family values, she brought the baby along for the photo op when she signed them.
She then had taken Kendrick home and handed her over to the nanny who basically raised her during her baby and toddler years. Robin couldn’t wait to get back to the office to work on issues she cared most about. “You can be a father and a lawyer,” she’d said to Tom, “and nobody expects you to choose one or the other. And if you chose being a lawyer, no one would bat an eye or call you a bad father.”
Standing now in her teenager’s bedroom, its walls covered with posters of brooding musicians she’d never heard of and her desk strewn with worn-out Shakespeare plays, Robin was proud of the young woman Kendrick was becoming. She wished she knew her better and were closer to her. She had struggled with that for most of Kendrick’s childhood. Every now and then regret over the years she’d lost slipped in, but Robin had learned to put it out of her mind, like she did with anything she didn’t want to think about too much, anything that interfered with her ambition. She knew she’d made mistakes, but she’d never apologize for having goals. Nor would she ever join one of the support groups that encouraged career women to feel guilty, or to cope with their guilt. She saw flyers for them all around town—“How to Have It All,” “What’s Wrong with Having It All?” and “Split in Two and Suffering.” She despised the idea that women should feel ashamed for pursuing their dreams with as much drive as men did.
“Whatever you may hear,” Robin said carefully, “it isn’t true.”
“How many times are you gonna say that?” Kendrick asked with a smile.
Robin looked warmly at her daughter. She hoped she would grow up to be like her, at least in all of the ways she liked. She prayed that unlike herself, Kendrick would be honest about who she was, no matter what. Robin started to leave. “Don’t forget to read your Bible after your studies.”
Kendrick saluted her.
“Don’t be disrespectful, or that video game will stay in the store.”
Kendrick smirked. “Nah, you’ll get busy, then get it for me anyway to buy back my love.”
“Come here!” Robin ran to her and mussed her hair until they were both laughing. When they calmed down, Robin sighed. “Oh, you precocious thing! I love you, Ken.”
“I know.”
Robin closed the door and paused in the hall for a long moment. What would her daughter think of her if she knew the truth?
Chapter Twelve
Dr. Paul Gentry paced the auditorium stage, scratching his black beard, not really looking at us as we feverishly took notes. He seemed to be a pillar of composure, but he held his chalk like a cigarette, which made me wonder about his personal life. I couldn’t imagine him as a smoker. He was so neat and clean. His scrawny neck poked through a white shirt that was impeccably starched, and his gray suit was so perfectly tidy it could have still been on a hanger in a store. “Film Appreciation,” the words he’d scribbled on the board two weeks ago on the first day of class, remained on the blackboard, reminding us what he was trying to teach us.
“Film is a conscious art,” he said. “Meaning that every character, every scene, right down to the last detail, is put there to move the story forward. Everything is there for a reason.”
I smiled to myself at the truth of that statement. The predicament in which I found myself wasn’t an accident at all. Somewhere deep, deep down in the craters of my mind I’d known that this time was going to come, that one day I’d no longer be able to block out the memories of those schoolgirl crushes, no longer be able to convince myself that they were part of a strange phase that the Your Body is Changing book probably said was perfectly normal, not permanent and nothing to worry about. Then again, knowing Mom’s discomfort about all things sexual, I never got to read Your Body is Changing.
I bet my guardian angel was knocking back martinis with h
er angel buddies at this very minute and having a good laugh about the ignorance and confusion that had kept me tossing and turning for days now.
Dr. Gentry passed out a list of approved films we could check out from the film library in the Performing Arts building. The one that immediately caught my eye was Desert Hearts, about a woman who goes to Reno to get a divorce in the 1950s and falls for a female casino worker. I’d seen a write-up about it in Seventeen magazine—a short piece about the shocking content of this new movie about lesbians. Somewhere in my mind, I’d filed it away under “Things to See Later When I Wasn’t Living Under the Same Roof as Dad.” Maybe when Adrienne went home some weekend I could check it out and rent the VCR in the lobby…
Later that afternoon on the way back from class, I spotted Adrienne heading up the hill to our dorm. There were so many hills in Tallahassee; it was the San Francisco of Florida.
“Hey, stranger!” I called to her in a playful tone.
Adrienne whipped around and smiled as she recognized me. Her long, highlighted caramel hair and twinkling dark eyes caught the sun as she stood there. She looked like a model in a magazine. Her deep red, silk shirt—the top buttons opened just enough to reveal her tan skin and long neck—clung to her chest. It was an image I knew I would always remember, like a favorite photograph you kept in your pocket even when it got tattered and creased.
I rushed to catch up to her, and Adrienne said, “You’re just in time. I was gonna order a pizza.”
“Oh, sure, make me fat.” I bumped her arm, teasing her. Although we’d begun like two anxious cheetahs sizing each other up in a cage, we’d quickly developed a familiarity that made us seem as if we’d been friends a long time. There was also an unmistakable spark between us, which made me nervous as well as excited. I was feeling giddy, my head floating somewhere up in the ozone as we walked together, feeling the warm, late afternoon breeze. The campus was so welcoming with rows of pink and orange hibiscus lining the walkways, everything flowery and friendly, matching my mood.
Hurricane Days Page 6
